miércoles, 6 de julio de 2011

Well, I must say I have learnt many things in this brief period, and of course I am very glad. I learn many tricks about Blogs, Flickrcc, Word and Power Point. I absolutely loved Diigo and I hope I can continue using it throughout my whole teaching career.In spite of the fear technology might arise, I believe this subject is vital for teachers as our present and future are completely immersed in a non-stop technological development. Therefore, teachers should not be left out. Otherwise, education will be transformed into an anachronistic entity that will prepare students neither for their working life nor their social life.

WB. I had my chat session last Friday with the teacher, María and Daniela. Althought it was a very short exchange, I was able to draw a couple of interesting conclusions. Firstly, I learnt some chat jargon such as chat lingo, BWL, ROFL and many emoticons to express our feeling while chatting. Furthermore, it was interesting to devote some minutes to reflecting upon the different benefits of chat (to develop fluency) as opposed to emails (to develop accuracy,) JMO.See you L8R, :) :) :)H&K

Diigo is a social bookmarking website which allows signed-up users to bookmark and tag web-pages. Additionally, it allows users to highlight any part of a webpage and attach sticky notes to specific highlights or to a whole page. These annotations can be kept private, shared with a group within Diigo or a special link forwarded to someone else. The name "Diigo" is an acronym from "Digest of Internet Information, Groups and Other stuff". This is a wonderful tool for teachers since it allows us to keep in touch with our colleagues and share the best sites and resources from the Net. It is also great to study and for group work!

martes, 5 de julio de 2011

On our assessment third session, we (Karina and me) were asked to validate a site of our choice according to certain requirements such as accuracy, authority, currency and objectivity. To me, this is of great importance for me as a teacher and as a student because the Internet offers thousands of sites, many of which are not reliable as learning resources.

Being Merriam-Webster one of the authorities in the field of the language, we thought the information and contents provided would be accurate enough.

We can corroborate the authenticity of the said site by looking at the logo, the credentials referring to the Encyclopedia Britannica, the accuracy of the vocabulary which is definitely related to the topic, and the URL.

3)As regards objectivity, we both thought the vocabulary used in the present site is as free from bias as it can be, because the topic is inherently related to facts and the few ads which appear are strongly related to teaching languages and technological appliances sponsored by Merrian-Webster.

4) There are no dead links in the present page, and this tells us that the site is regularly updated and looked at.

5) There is no special software and no fees are required to have access to the present page.

To conclude: we believe this site is valid as a research source on the origins of the English language for either students or teachers.

This is a presentation taken from a chapter of the book The Internet for Dummies called Ten Fun or Worthwhile Things you Can Do with the Internet.

This was a great opportunity to learn more about the dos and donts of power point presentations: backgrounds, images, fonts, size, etcetera. Sometimes you get so carried away with the details of the slides’ design that you forget the audience and the real aim of the presentation.

Also, this was an enriching experience for me because I learnt more about the origins of the Internet and some interesting things you can do with it such as visiting museums and travelling around the world. Moreover, there were several tricks I did not know about twitter, blogs and browsers.

And… last but not least, it was a great opportunity for me to get to know a bit more about my classmates.

Here we explored how Microsoft Word and Google docs can make things easier for us! Firstly, we learnt some ideas on how to face the process of writing in general like how to brainstorm ideas for example by using pictures taken from Flickrcc (not copyrighted images) or how to focus, and draft and re-draft. Afterwards, we went through some tools such as the spelling checker, the bulleting, footnotes and the hyperlink tools. We also compared the advantages and disadvantages of using Word and Google docs.

I must say I am very :) with the course (and I am not saying this just because.)I have learned several things about word I did not know such as organizing text in columns, adding subaccounts to gmail, adding hyperlinks with definitions, and that there are different free alternatives to Word.

Also, I learned I should not type ja ja to express laughter but LOL :) :)

Moreover, I started practising typing in the "correct" way, that is to say, although I type relatively fast, I do not always place my fingers in the right spot. So now, I am making the effort to get better at this. I would like to learn the whole pack of office in the same way we worked with word processors, but of course, I don´t think there is time for that. Generally speaking, I would like to keep on learning things that help teachers improve and speed up the design of lessons. Summing up, I find this course quite enriching

Below you can take a look at the outcome of my first assessment session. ;)

viernes, 1 de julio de 2011

Hello, everyone!I am Lucía, a strudent and teacher at the liceo. I am happy to be a part of this course because it is always nice to learn new things on technolgy that will help us, teachers, improve our lessons; and make them more engaging and useful to the students.In this blog, I will enter some of the activities and papers I had created for this course.Hope you like them!